I was freezing my ass off.

My nose had lost feeling, my fingers were stiff with cold even through my gloves, and my ass was about to fall off entirely. This was not helped by my being on horseback, bouncing in a saddle as my mount trotted along a snow-covered trail. This particular trip marked only the third time in my life I had been in a saddle, and as the first two times happened when I was six years old or so, my body had forgotten what it was like. My thighs had gone numb ages ago.

The route ran through the Trail of Tears State Park, and despite the tragic history of the location, the scenery was gorgeous. The couple inches of snow on the ground had fallen only a few days before, and with the temperature hovering right below freezing, it had melted and refrozen just enough that my steed’s hoofs crunched through it with a satisfying sound. The air was still enough that the only windchill was from the steady pace we set as we worked our way through the heavily wooded hills towards the evening’s campsite.

Hanging on behind me, her arms wrapped around my waist, was the Sin Demon I had—in a moment of panicked lack of creativity—named ‘Cindy’. Barely five feet tall and slender, by all appearances she should be the one to be suffering the most from the wintery weather. The coat and jeans she wore were barely sufficient to ward off an early winter chill, let alone the mid-February freeze we were currently experiencing, but she hadn’t even bothered with a hat for her color-streaked blonde hair. Indeed, the way her lissome body clung to my much larger back was for my benefit rather than hers. Heat radiated from her and helped ward off the ongoing and pervasive chill that would otherwise have soaked through me.

The hells, it turned out, ran hot.

Hell was not where I would normally have turned for companionship, but I had discovered the year before that not everyone was quite so discerning. In the course of investigating some ‘spooky shit’ in my apartment complex at the behest of my landlady, I’d come across the half-finished ritual that summoned Cindy and had been faced with a choice: either allow the ritual to fall apart on its own, or complete it myself. Since my native magic informed me that the former would have come at the cost of some kind of unspecified terrible devastation, I had opted for the latter.

Her shape had been decided in the already-completed half of the ritual, before her original summoner—Mycah, one of my apartment complex neighbors—succumbed to his own stupidity, hormones, or both. He’d stepped into the still-active ritual circle as his final act on Earth.

I technically didn’t know if he was actually dead. He hadn’t left a body, and I hadn’t yet brought myself to ask Cindy about his fate.

What I hadn’t realized when frantically tapping into my Gift to navigate the successful completion of the summoning ritual was that I was not only binding Cindy to prevent her from wreaking havoc on the world, I was specifically tethering her to myself. It had become my duty to ensure that she received her daily allotment of Sin.

Of the seven options available to me, Lust was the easiest to generate in sufficient quantities. Cindy was quite vocally enthusiastic about the process, and in the past week alone had called herself my ‘sex slave’, ‘fuck toy’, ‘cum dump’, and—on one occasion—‘horny little demon butt slut’.

Cindy had many qualities. Subtlety was not one of them.

For most of the morning, she snuggled herself lazily against my back in the full grip of Sloth. As the day had gone on, though, she had increasingly been growing more awake and frisky. Since the cold pushed Lust into the dark corners of my mind, her behavior served as a barometer for another companion’s state. I would need to deal with that when I got back to camp.

With that in mind, I took one last glance through the essence dowser I carried. The device’s simple appearance, formed of two thin metal rods entwined at one end to form a handle that branched off into a ‘v’, resembled that of dowsing rods of legend. More traditional dowsing rods were made of wood, and were mostly used by con men and grifters who claimed to be able to use them to find underground water. Mine was crafted by a proper wizard, and was used to find traces of magic.

On this occasion, though, the only signs of anything supernatural were the ones I brought with me—I’d caught an occasional glimpse of faded auras by peering through the triangle formed by the two rods throughout the day, but nothing close to the bright colors I’d been searching for. I tugged at the reins lightly and prepared to head to camp.

My arrival at the campsite was greeted by a warm smile from Aubrette. The tall redhead’s long green dress wouldn’t have looked out of place at a ren faire, though the tent behind her was far more modern. She was seated on a stool beside the campfire with a small table set in front of her. As I watched, she finished chopping a turnip into chunks and tipped it into a large pot that hung off the same pole over the fire as an entire plucked chicken.

The knife fell from her hand as she rose, but never touched the ground. Instead, it dropped out of sight as though vanishing behind a screen as Aubrette stopped maintaining the magic she had used to conjure it. The High Sidhe delivered a courtly bow as I approached and dismounted. “My lord.”

“Hey Aubrette. Zarina out setting up wards?”

“Indeed, my Lord. She will be perhaps another twenty or thirty minutes before returning. Your supper will take slightly longer, though I suspect you shall not notice its absence.”

It took a moment for me to realize what she was referring to. While Cindy had dismounted with me and was approaching from behind, the sound of the tent’s zipper meant that my mount had something other than rest and relaxation in mind. “Ah, duty calls. We’ll have a talk about next steps when we’re all here, but in the meantime, I have a Puca to reward.”

“Even so, my Lord Jack. Your meal will be ready when you emerge.” Left unsaid was that the insatiable voyeur of a Sidhe would tap into the Glamour I fed her through her bond of service to watch everything that happened inside the tent.

I walked close enough to lean in and brush my lips across hers. Even in the cold, after a day spent in the woods, she tasted of honey and spring flowers. I went in for another taste, but while the tall redhead was more than willing to indulge, the tiny blonde behind me was not so forgiving. When I felt shockingly strong hands begin to push me towards the tent, I had no choice but to move in that direction.

Despite my protests, I was looking forward to getting to the tent. Rose and I had discovered that the ancient Puca magic that bound her to my service had many facets and flexible definitions. For example, while she was my mount and I her rider, that applied equally to the bedroom as to galloping through snow covered woods. That drive compelled her to serve in either capacity, but it didn’t seem to differentiate particularly between the two.

I pushed through the tent flap and stepped inside. The interior of the tent was pleasantly warm—courtesy of Zarina’s magic, no doubt—which quickly thawed my extremities and enabled Rose to greet me in a way that made clear her intentions.

That the Puca’s ass was in the air, wiggling slowly from side to side in invitation was unsubtle enough, but she had reached back between her thighs to play with the glistening lips of her soaking wet cunt. After hours of riding through the woods, she was more than ready for a good hard fuck, and had no problem making that clear.

Where Cindy had the slender athletic build of a gymnast or a ballerina, Rose was five feet and three inches of soft feminine curves—at least in her ‘human’ form. Her breasts were larger than her head and bulged out to either side beneath her torso. The ass that greeted me was full and round, and the fact that her stomach wasn’t perfectly flat and her thighs were thick only served to drive home the point that she was a walking example of an ancient ideal.

Rose was built to fuck.

My pants dropped to my knees as I positioned myself behind her, and without foreplay or warning I sank my cock into her pretty pink pussy in a single thrust. A long blissful moan escaped her lips as she shoved herself back to take me to the hilt. I slapped against her ass loudly but couldn’t be bothered to worry about the others hearing—Aubrette’s voyeuristic nature meant she was almost certainly already watching, while Cindy’s connection to Lust meant she knew what was going to happen before we even reached the camp. There was a reason she was so insistent that I not linger with Aubrette.

I swiftly fell into a familiar rhythm. It was the same one I’d been experiencing all day as rider and mount, only interpreted through a very different lens. I rode Rose at a gallop and she responded with enthusiasm. Each thrust of my cock was greeted by the welcome embrace of a channel that rippled and squeezed around it as though welcoming it home, as I fucked the Puca hard, fast, and with no small amount of glee.

Compared to Cindy’s somewhat performative enthusiasm, Rose was fun to fuck. Not that I didn’t enjoy what the Sin Demon had to offer—far from it—but she was interested in Lust over everything else. She was willing to accommodate anything I might have in mind, but the fact that her desires were so obviously shaped by her nature was hard to ignore. The Puca, by comparison, wanted to have a good time. In this case, that meant exploring the depths of her greedy pussy, but her general approach to life was refreshingly hedonistic and straightforward. It made her easy company in general, and meant that I didn’t feel worried when my orgasm approached rather swiftly.

I’d spent enough time in Rose’s cunt to know that she came while I was fucking her—more than once, in fact, though neither had been particularly big. Having already delivered an appetizer, though, I felt no remorse in giving her what she really wanted quickly. My hips slapped into her ass as I buried myself to the hilt and painted her insides white.

The climax that sparked in her was not small—the Puca shuddered as she shoved her ass back and clamped down around my length. Her pussy rippled as though milking me as she sought to extract every single drop of my cum that she could, all while her body shook in the grip of a massive orgasm. Only when my balls stopped twitching and pulsing did she relax and collapse forward with a happy sigh.

I pulled out—drawing a whimper of betrayal from Rose in the process—and collapsed on my back beside her on the mattress. As she snuggled up to my chest, I took a deep breath, then let out a quiet laugh.

“Hmm?” Rose’s inquiry wasn’t verbal, but the question was clear.

“Just thinking how lucky I am.”

“You’re goddamn right. Not many men get to fuck their own Puca.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess. Mostly, I was just thinking that I’m really happy you don’t smell like a horse.”

She slapped my shoulder lightly. Then she started giggling. It was infectious, and I joined her almost instantly in laughter. When the tent flap opened a minute later to admit Aubrette, Cindy, and Zarina, the three women were greeted by the sight of me on my back, pants around my ankles, while a still naked Rose giggled against me.

“Oh, perfect! Aubrette, dear, you have some cleaning to do.” The redhead had stopped moving as a blush overtook her the moment she walked in, but Cindy wasn’t having any of it. Despite being more than a foot shorter than the high Sidhe, the Sin Demon was inexorable as she placed a hand in the small of Aubrette’s back and pushed her forward to join us.

The former noble dropped to her knees compliantly as Zarina spoke, “The camp is warded against discovery—unless someone has magic, they aren’t going to stumble onto us. And if they do, there are other protections in place. Hello, Master, I see that you’ve been busy.”

I did my best to keep my voice even as I replied. It was challenging because Aubrette—at Cindy’s nonverbal direction—had started to clean me with her mouth, and the redhead’s tongue and lips were extremely talented. “Hi Zarina. No luck, then?”

“None. When you’re finished with your duties we can talk through everything in detail, but the short version is that there’s sign it came through here, but not that it’s here right now. I think it was looking for something.”

I grunted. Aubrette’s lips sealed around the base of my dick, heedless of the mix of my cum and Rose’s nectar that coated it. I was still sensitive from my recent orgasm, though with the Sin flowing through my body my refractory period was all but gone. It kept the sensations from being quite overwhelming and—for better or for worse—meant that there was no chance I’d go soft immediately.

This was not a fact that escaped Cindy. She scooted up on her knees next to Aubrette and tangled her fingers through the redhead’s hair. The curly locks were basically immune to tangles thanks to her Fae nature, and the Sin Demon took full advantage of this by gathering them up behind her head and using the resultant ponytail as a handle. She used the Sidhe’s mouth far more roughly than I would have, pushing forward until I popped into her throat and holding her there for several seconds while she spoke. “Fun first, then business. You have obligations, Master.”

I folded my hands behind my head and relaxed as the tiny blonde took advantage of Aubrette’s exhibitionist streak. While I had planned to talk to everyone outside around the campfire, snuggling up to one fairy while a second gave me a blowjob was an attractive prospect, and Cindy wasn’t wrong—I did have an obligation to ensure the Sin Demon’s needs are met.

* * *

Some time later, four of us were seated on little folding chairs inside the tent while Aubrette cooked outside. The High Sidhe was able to conjure food fully cooked, but doing so tied up a bit of her concentration for a time. We were already relying on the redhead for the camping equipment, so we had brought real food rather than stretch her powers more than necessary.

I took a sip of tea as Zarina spoke, the wizard’s expression serious. “All reports from the guardian in Tennessee do point to the impundulu being nearby, but the only magical signatures I was able to find in the area were from other creatures. That strongly supports the idea that not only is the lightning bird bonded as a familiar, the witch that has bonded it is actively working to conceal its location.”

What I’d learned from Zarina in the past few months was that wizards had a loose network of volunteers who worked to protect mortals from the depredations of creatures with supernatural abilities. They also worked to keep public knowledge of magic to a minimum, but that mission was not absolute. Many wizards actually wanted to bring the supernatural back into public awareness, but the prevailing wisdom was that the smartest way to do so was slowly, from the ground up. Their goal was to promote general public acceptance and knowledge so the shock of the reveal would be less world shattering.

My business ventures actually fit their plans perfectly by spreading information via word of mouth to a limited audience.

Our present adventure was due to the former mandate though, not the latter. An impundulu, or lightning bird—or a couple other names for the same creature—was a supernatural monster native to Africa associated with plagues, lightning, and chaos. They were nearly immortal, all but impervious to attacks that didn’t involve fire, highly resistant to enchantments, and extremely cunning. They were said to drink blood, influence the minds of mortals, and could appear in both human and bird forms. Oh, and apparently they were known to cause people to have sex, although I had to wonder if that wasn’t because people just did that.

We’d received information a couple months back that one had traveled to the United States, and had been spotted southeast of us moving slowly in our direction. Zarina had set up a series of wards several years back: magic enchantments meant to detect the presence of powerful supernatural creatures coming into the area. It was how she had come into my own life a few months prior. She had detected a powerful demonic entity shortly after Cindy was summoned, and I had blundered into asking her about Sin Demons at the library. That was enough to put me on a very short watchlist. After two Fae arrived, the wizard had taken it upon herself to place some much more specific and specialized spells on my apartment to keep track of what I was doing.

I’d actually passed her as she was leaving after she set those up. At the time, I’d assumed she just lived in the building, not that she was there because of me.

Now we were exploring the state park because something had tripped the alarm in the area not long after Zarina’s grandfather had warned her of the impundulu’s approach. The farther out from the city we went, the worse the detail we had available. At this range, Zarina hadn’t had the time to set up a whole set of intricate enchantments to tell us who, what, and where they detected. Instead, the outer ring was little more than a series of magical tripwires set to go off if anything sufficiently powerful approached within a hundred miles of St. Louis.

They had triggered a week or so prior, but the next ring within hadn’t. That could mean that something approached from the southeast and then turned around and left again, but it also could mean it was still here. This expedition had set out to determine which of those two possibilities was correct.

I set down my thermos of tea as I responded to Zarina. “I found some traces of color, but it was all green, brown, or yellow—none of the black and gold you described. Any idea what might have been leaving the traces we did find? Is it possible there’s a… bigfoot, or something that just wandered into the area, and the lightning bird is still in Tennessee?” I knew I didn’t sound convincing even to myself, but I had to ask.

Zarina shook her head. “It’s extremely improbable that anything significant enough to trigger the wards just happened to wander into this specific area shortly after we were warned about the impundulu. The outer ring isn’t finely tuned, it’s set up to only notify me if something actually big comes through. I didn’t want to waste my time running around every time a centennial vampire came to town. What you found were probably traces of Fae creatures in the area. You might not even be able to tell them apart from local wildlife if you ran into them face to face.”

She paused for a moment, before adding, “There used to be a werewolf pack that lived in the area too. I haven’t heard from them in a while, though, so it’s possible they moved on.” I nodded slowly at that. With the way my life had been going for the past year, that she didn’t correct me on the existence of bigfoot didn’t even faze me.

Eventually, Aubrette returned with plates of food—in this case skewers of mixed vegetables and cubes of chicken—and we all settled down to eat. I took the time while our mouths were occupied to reflect on how lucky I felt. Sure, I was camping in the middle of a freezing winter to try to hunt down a legendary bird vampire before it could cause too much chaos, but I was privileged to do it with several women who were all impressively wonderful in their own way.

The rest of the evening passed in exhausted relaxation. All of us—save Cindy—were tired from the day’s exertions, so we took the time to recover in anticipation of another long day. If we didn’t find anything by the end of tomorrow, we were going to need to head back to town and plan another expedition later. I was somewhat torn between wanting to just find the damn bird to be done with it, and hoping that it had somehow sensed Zarina’s wards and fled. The former would mean we could deal with whatever threat it represented now. The latter meant we might not have to deal with it at all.

* * *

The following day turned out to be a bust as well. We split up in the morning, met up for a quick lunch-and-Sin break at midday, but by the time the sky started to darken we had found nothing. We met back up in the parking lot, packed up our few non-conjured supplies in Zarina’s SUV, and then all piled in.

It was a long drive from the park to the city—over a hundred miles—so we were going to be in the car for a while. Fortunately, the ladies were good company. We’d gotten fake IDs made for Aubrette and Cindy, but I still wasn’t sure how well they would hold up, so Rose was behind the wheel. She was as far from human as Aubrette was, but her parents had entered the mortal plane far enough back that they were able to get themselves in the system before computers made that tricky. When she was born, she got a birth certificate and a Social Security number issued from the government, so she was an official legal citizen, complete with driver’s license.

Aubrette had taken the navigator’s seat, which left me in the back between Cindy and Zarina. Trapped in a car with four beautiful women for several hours, I naturally took advantage of the situation. Within minutes of hitting the road, I was deep within a fascinating conversation with my enchanted wizard.

Once it had become clear that Zarina wasn’t going to be able to easily free herself from the spell she had cast that made me the most important person in her life, I’d asked her to take some time to start teaching me about not just her means of working magic, but also the greater magical world. For all of my childhood, my family had lived on the outskirts of the supernatural community—too few and too insignificant for anyone with real power to take notice. It left us grasping at legends and word of mouth to understand the hidden worlds beneath the surface.

In a way, I’d been worse off than someone purely mundane—at least they didn’t know for certain that there were pieces on the board they couldn’t see. The lessons Zarina provided had been more than eye opening. Not only had I learned about entire magical populations and communities that my family had never even heard of, I’d started to gain some insights into how they had changed over the years.

Wizards and vampires and various natives of other planes such as Fae could live for centuries if they didn’t meet a violent end, and that longevity shaped their world view in more ways than one. A vampire who remembered the end of the Holy Roman Empire was unlikely to care about modern political boundaries, and a water elemental would be far more concerned with the state of the ocean than the lands it surrounded.

Add in the strife and posturing made inevitable by the personal power of some of the individuals in the world, and rather than the magical world being made of sets of nations, or even clans or tribes of like creatures, you had a dispersion of small groups and communities who sometimes warred for turf like rival gangs. Zarina had been doing her best to get me caught up to the current mago-political map of the US Midwest, but I had a lot of ground to cover.

She was also trying to teach me more of the basic theory of magic as practiced by wizards, including how to use their style of magic. Unfortunately, the results of those lessons were far less promising, for one simple reason: when it came to wielding the arcane like a wizard, I sucked.

More specifically, the incantations and spells that Zarina used just didn’t come naturally to me. From what she explained, that wasn’t necessarily a surprise. Apparently most people had differing affinities for styles and types of magic. The fact that I was able to form a powerful bond with a demon, and two Fae women meant that my affinity for Sin and Glamour had to be high. In contrast, my affinity for the Arcana that wizards leveraged was probably pretty low. It wasn’t unheard of to have someone with multiple powerful affinities, but this did not seem to be one of mine.

What drove me crazy was that there didn’t seem to be any way to test for affinities short of attempting to use that kind of magic. Affinities tended to run in families, so genetics offered some limited insights. In my case, though, we would’ve needed a trip to Arizona to have Zarina try to figure out the power source my parents’ Gifts drew on, since they didn’t know themselves.

Even that was a long shot, since minor talents weren’t widely studied or well understood, so it had been pushed to a lower priority. There were more important things going on, and figuring out exactly what kinds of magic my parents used would have to wait.

Still, the lessons were interesting, and even if I couldn’t put some of it to practice, it was neat to learn more about how wizards worked. Cindy chimed in from time to time to clarify some points about Sin, and Aubrette spent a good fifteen minutes explaining how humans produced Glamour. I found it fascinating that both Glamour and Sin were produced by mortals, but wielded primarily by Fae and demons respectively.

The implications were fascinating—if somewhat academic at this point. None of my companions had any definitive answers on the topic, but it made for a captivating half hour or so of conversation as we finally made our way back to St. Louis.

* * *

It was late by the time we pulled into the parking lot at the apartment complex. It was also in the single-digit temperature range and snowing gently, so there were basically no people in sight. Rose let out a growl of frustration as she tried to turn into her reserved parking space beside my Honda, only to see that there was a brand new black SUV parked in it already. The visitor parking lot was also full, so we wound up having to drive the whole way out to overflow parking.

Most of us had stripped off at least some of our warm camping clothes for the drive home, since sitting in a heated car made them redundant, but we took a few minutes to put them back on in preparation for the walk back. Only when we were all ready did we open the doors to Zarina’s SUV and climb outside. We had only taken a few steps towards the apartment building when shapes began to manifest through the snow in front of us.

As they drew closer, I was able to begin to make out details in the dark. Sauntering towards me was a man, slightly shorter than me due to my relatively recent Glamour-enhanced height, whose age I could confidently pin down as “adult”. He was dressed in a burgundy silk shirt and black slacks, but gave no sign of discomfort in the cold. His shoulder-length hair was wavy and dark, and framed an obnoxiously handsome face. The sneer he wore didn’t particularly help, nor did the cold disregard he showed when his eyes flitted across me and my companions.

It was only when he stopped about ten feet away that I went from cautious to alarmed—being approached by someone wasn’t necessarily a problem, but when I noticed that the snowflakes which landed on him weren’t melting, I knew that something was amiss. Worse, several more figures approached from behind and fanned out slowly around their leader. In seconds, I was facing seven people—four men and three women—who looked like they could have found work as models. The least attractive of them was merely good-looking, and every one of them was outfitted in designer clothes that were utterly inappropriate for the cold.

I halted as my own companions drew up close around me. Cindy and Zarina took flanking positions to either side, while Aubrette and Rose took up the rear. Several long seconds passed as each group studied the others, until finally the strangers’ leader broke the silence.

“Give us the redhead and you get to go on about your lives.” The man’s voice was a rich baritone, with an Italian accent nearly strong enough to make him difficult to understand. He stood eerily still, even as the others accompanying him continued to slowly spread out to either side.

I turned my head towards Aubrette to see how she reacted to the man’s words. The Sidhe gave them a withering glare but remained silent, so I took it upon myself to respond. “We aren’t going to give you anyone. How about you tell me who you are, and what this is all about, and we keep things calm?”

It wasn’t one of the seven people opposite me who answered my first question, but Zarina. Her voice was quiet, though in the snowbound silence that surrounded us I was sure everyone present heard her. “They’re vampires. All of them. Not ancient ones, but probably not newly turned, either.” Vampires tended to grow more powerful with age, so our opponents being newer was moderately good news. Apparently freshly risen vampires were little stronger than they were before dying, but the really old ones were terrifying to contemplate.

The same vampire spoke again. “The wizard is correct. We are vampires. And what this is about is simple. We want your Fairy. You took Franca from us, we will take her from you.” I blinked at that, confused.

“I… took Franca from you? You’ve lost me.” As I spoke, I noticed a few more shapes taking position behind the vampires, bringing their total count to ten. The leader—or at least, the one talking—didn’t so much as turn his head.

“You’re right—allow me to introduce myself, this will go much smoother. You may call me Vittorio. I am an… assistant to Duke Cherto. Ms. Malle, I do not know your connection to these individuals, but perhaps you can explain the situation to them. Your four companions were seen leaving the floor of Club Aurora some months back, in the company of one of our number, Franca. Some time later, we discovered what little remained of her. It has taken some time to investigate and determine who was responsible—Duke Cherto certainly did not wish to inflict vengeance on an innocent man and allow the killer of one of his own to go free, after all.” The entire time the vampire spoke, he remained motionless, only flicking his eyes to the side when he addressed Zarina, before returning them to meet mine.

“We are here now because we are sure. I do not know what trickery you used to fell Franca, but it will not work here. We are more than twice your number, and we are on guard. Our offer is not an unreasonable one. We understand that you were likely defending yourselves against a more powerful being, a predator preying on you. Simply give us that one to balance the scales, and never raise a hand against us again. You cannot ask for a more merciful or reasonable offer.” Vittorio only moved after he finished speaking. His arm raised with slow deliberation to point towards Aubrette, then his fingers twitched in twice in a beckoning motion as though he expected her to obey.

I took in a deep, slow breath to steady myself. From what both Cindy and Zarina had told me before, most vampires didn’t stand a chance against a Sin Demon. These apparently weren’t scrubs, and there were ten of them, but we had a wizard, and it didn’t seem like they actually knew what happened last Halloween. I didn’t actually know myself—this must have gone down while I’d been occupied with a certain Puca prankster—but it ultimately didn’t matter. I could find that out later, after we dealt with these pricks.

A quick glance to Zarina got a nod, and a look at Cindy told me everything I needed to know about her opinion on the topic. She was grinning with a manic look in her eyes that told me the only reason she hadn’t erupted into violence was that she was waiting on my signal.

I looked back to Vittorio. “No. I’m sure by whatever code of behavior you’re following your offer is reasonable, but I’m not going to give you Aubrette. You don’t get to show up and tell us that we owe you something because we defended ourselves.”

The tall vampire raised a single eyebrow and canted his head to the side in surprise. “You are sure? The alternative is that we take all of you, drain most of you dry, and then take our time dining on Fae for the next few months or years anyway. I won’t complain, of course—that’s more for us—but it’s a worse deal for you.”

“No.” I shook my head for emphasis. “That’s not what’s going to happen. Cindy? Destroy them.”

Cindy launched forward in a blur.

I don’t think the vampires expected us to take the offensive. They outnumbered us two to one, and were the aggressors in the confrontation, but I didn’t see any reason why we had to follow their script.

The tiny blonde Sin Demon hit their line like a bowling ball, sending vampires scattering in her wake. In the first second of the fight I watched her right arm blur in a tight arc towards one of the female vampires. The woman showed admirable reflexes, because as fast as Cindy was, the vampire managed to bring up her own forearm to block.

That proved to have been a mistake that cost her half of her arm. As far as I could tell, Cindy didn’t even lose momentum as she sent the vampire’s hand spinning off into the snow, only to plant her foot as she stepped forward and drove her hand straight through the taller woman’s chest.

Things got more chaotic from there.

A flash of insight from my Gift had me take a step back, and a pale fist streaked past my face. I managed to barely make out Vittorio’s face behind it as the tall vampire stepped in past Cindy and attempted to bear me down with his inhuman strength. He was shorter than I was by several inches, but tales of vampiric powers were not without merit, and the force he was able to exert was considerable. He took another bare-handed swing at my face with a casually curled fist.

I caught it without thinking.

My Gift gleamed inside my head as it guided me and I found my fingers wrapped around Vittorio’s immobile forearm as the vampire stared at me in shock. I tried to take advantage of his distraction with a swift kick to his legs, but of the two of us he was obviously the more experienced fighter. He stepped into the kick to rob it of any momentum, then pushed back and wrenched his arm free of my grasp with a snarl.

Nearly a year before, when I first walked into my neighbor Mycah’s apartment I had learned something about my Gift that I had never expected. My understanding before then was that my inherent magic was limited to forecasting the outcome of any given action. It gave me a general impression of how well it would likely turn out, which was both subjective to my own perspective and heavily influenced by the free will of anyone involved.

When I encountered Mycah’s half-finished summoning ritual I found myself in a situation with no free will other than my own, no other humans to muddy the waters. Further, the outcomes were extremely binary—either I would successfully protect myself by completing the ritual, or I would die. It had cleared up the muddy waters that clouded the future and highlighted a crystal-clear path to success.

When Vittorio decided to take the fight seriously, I felt my Gift kick into high gear once again. Zarina was free-willed, but she had stepped in to intercept several more vampires that were attempting to flank me. It was enough.

I stepped to the left as Vittorio launched a punch through the space my head had occupied. When his fingers opened and then closed to attempt to give him a grip on me and prevent me from dodging, they found only air as I ducked down and drove my fist into his gut.

It was like punching a side of frozen beef. Pain shot up my forearm, but the grunt it drew from the vampire told me it wasn’t wasted effort.

I could do this. My mind sank into the Gift as I gave myself over to its guidance.

The next several seconds passed in a blur. While the sight of Vittorio’s fingernails lengthening into wicked claws seared itself into my memory to resurface in a later nightmare, the moment to moment motion of dodging and striking back happened without my own conscious intervention. My Gift directed me, and I followed.

I was able to land a few hits on Vittorio, but while each landed hard enough to knock him back, they didn’t particularly seem to bother him otherwise. As I cast about for a weapon—for anything I could use to hit him with to do some actual damage—I took in the parking lot which had abruptly become a battlefield.

My eyes scanned past Cindy, who was currently surrounded by three vampires, two of whom were missing arms—one at the elbow and one at the shoulder. Two more were crumpled on the ground nearby. Zarina was surrounded by a golden glowing sphere, and the tight coils of her hair had expanded to form a cloud-like nimbus around her head. Two vampires scrabbled at the outside of the orb, but not only were they unable to penetrate it, their hands smoked and burned as they touched it.

Just beyond Zarina, I watched as Aubrette charged forward, her powerful legs helping as she pushed a vampire back with a long pole. Only when she shoved him to the side and twisted did I realize that it was actually the haft of a boar spear that she had buried in his chest, the tip having penetrated the whole way through to come out the other side.

The sight of my companions’ success buoyed my morale, but the distraction cost me. My connection to my Gift wavered as my awareness expanded to the space around me, and Vittorio managed to land a solid punch. I gasped as I felt a rib crack, then nearly doubled over at the spike of pain that shot through me in response.

Rather than pressing his advantage, the vampire sneered. “Fool. Now you and your women will be ours.”

My vision went white with Wrath.

Vittorio twisted to the side when my hand moved, but rather than another ineffective punch, this time I took a page from his own book. My fingers clutched at his blood red shirt and I yanked forward to pull him towards me. Even as I did, I balled up my free hand into a fist, and slammed it into his approaching face.

Then I did it again. And again, and again. At some point I felt a sting of pain as his claws dug into my shoulders, but by then I was alternating hitting the vampire’s face and ribs, and whatever it was he was doing to fight back didn’t seem to matter.

What mattered was the blinding anger that flooded me. Vittorio and his others had approached me. They had picked this fight. Ambushed me at my own home, tried to take from me, tried to kill me and those I loved.

The claws gradually stopped scrabbling at my shoulders, and the vampire slumped, but my grip on his shirt held him up so I could continue to hit him. Only when I felt his jaw pop loose did I realize that I was hitting someone who had stopped fighting back several punches ago. I dropped the now insignificant lump of meat while my blazing eyes searched for my next target.

There wasn’t one.

Cindy was surrounded by six crumpled and headless bodies that were already beginning to flake into sooty black ash. Aubrette stood a few yards away, her spearhead being cleaned of glistening vampire blood as it dried up and sloughed into the slush at her feet. Zarina’s orb faded, but the shimmering shield remained in place as she scanned our surroundings to ensure they were safe.

Rose’s human form was absent, but the conspicuous presence of a magnificent black mare standing over the body of a vampire whose chest had been caved in by a massive hoof provided an easy explanation. Horrifyingly, that vampire wasn’t dead—even with his ribs crushed, he was attempting to struggle back to his feet. Another stomp of Rose’s hoof dropped him again, but even pinned beneath that he continued to struggle.

“Master, you need to get inside. I’ll make sure these vampires are actually dead, and that there isn’t enough evidence for anyone to figure out what happened here. You go inside with the others and let Aubrette check you over. I’ll catch up.”

The wizard—normally calm and considered—had a concerned, almost fearful expression on her face as she looked at me. I realized that I was still grimacing in Wrath and did my best to dispel the grasp of Sin. The anger was slow to fade, but I was able to regain enough sense to nod. “Yes, you—yes.”

I turned to head towards the apartment. As I passed Cindy, the Sin Demon slid her way up against my side, wrapping one of her arms around my waist and plastering herself against me. She was practically purring, nuzzling her head against me even as we walked towards the building we called home.